13. Does the super supper salad loaf have mayonnaise in it?

14. Looks like it

Some mess of stuff mixed with mayonnaise is stuffed into a hollowed-out hunk of bologna, as far as I can tell.

These ghastly recipes make me thankful that my mom was an immigrant who couldn't afford "women's" magazines and who stuck to basic meat and potatoes. I cannot picture her messing around with weird Jello salads back in the 50s and 60s.

24. There's something "can-do"

22. I'm going to let them slide on the baloney loaf

All the accompanying text makes it clear this is a World War II recipe.

Think of it like the eating of escargots in France, donkeys in China or haggis in Scotland: food was extremely short then; anything that could possibly provide nutrition wound up on the menu. And just as French people had to eat their snails when royalty in Dijon took everything else, Americans during World War II were often forced to eat their Republicans.

35. Think of it as a psychological support mechanism

During World War II we pretty much suspended life as we knew it in the United States so we'd have enough materiel to fight the war. Therefore, people went to a LOT of effort to try to instill a little normalcy in their lives.

Do something next time you're at the supermarket: Go to the ketchup aisle and get a bottle of Kitchen Bouquet. It's caramel coloring and a mixture of vegetable flavorings (it used to contain molasses, but they took it out) and today is used to make your insipid-looking attempt at gravy a bit more palatable. During World War II, women used to put it on their legs - so people would think they were wearing nylons, a product impossible to get because all the nylon was needed for the war effort. It gets better: the only way to truly mimic the effect of nylons was to draw a line up the back of each leg with an eyeliner pencil.

In the first half of the Twentieth Century, visiting was a popular pastime. Rather than texting your friend or talking with her on the phone, you actually went to her house. Dinner parties were also popular...and if the only thing your ration book would possibly allow you to serve to company was a cored-out loaf of bologna filled with a mashed pea-mayonnaise-fruit juice mixture, then by damn you would serve that disgusting menu to your guests, and they would like it.

I found out about the jello salad fad from back then, too: if you encapsulated your veggies in gelatin they would stay fresh days longer than if you didn't. This was the era when a refrigerator small enough to fit on the front of a trailer, but powerful enough to bring the inside of the trailer to 40 degrees, didn't exist...so you saw fresh vegetables at the store maybe twice a week during the summer and they had to last until the next batch arrived. They even had vegetable-flavored jello so you could do it right. During the winter you weren't so lucky...if you didn't have a garden's worth of vegetables canned to get you through the cold months, your family got to go on the "scurvy and pellagra" diet that was basically all-starches with a little meat sometimes.

29. Would you believe gas stations handed out free amber colored glassware in the early 70s?

When in college I remember buying gas for 25 cents a gallon at the (long gone) PathMark gas station on Route 27 in Somerset NJ, and getting a free glass beverage tumbler with each purchase.

Usually their glasses were avocado green, and I amassed quite a set of glassware this way. Sometimes the glassware was amber-colored, or what we called harvest gold at the time. I consider both colors hideous and no longer own any of those glasses. I've seen plenty of them in thrift shops if you feel you must have some.

The Jello molds were more of a 50s-60s thing than a 70s trend as far as I know. After WW2 the many women who had worked in factories to support the war effort lost their jobs, which were given to returning soldiers. To keep the women busy at home and out of the work force , they were encouraged to have lots of babies and spend all their spare time preparing elaborate meals, sewing, doing cute little crafts, having coffee-klatches and cocktail parties, etc.

It's no wonder to me that suburban women in my mother's age group went crazy from boredom.

36. I have often wondered...

If you go into a grandma kitchen, you will almost invariably find copper-coated jello molds hanging on the walls as decoration. I know my grandma when she was still alive, every house she ever lived in, the first thing she did when she got all her stuff inside was to open up the kitchen box and hang up the jello molds. It never failed: I helped that woman move into six different houses and every fucking time she got in, the jello molds went on the wall before the pots went in the drawer, the linens in the linen closet or the soap in the soap dish.

The question I have is, did anyone in the history of the world, who wasn't working as a food stylist at an advertising agency, ever put jello in these things more than once? A metal jello mold is a grade-A pain in the ass because the jello doesn't want to come out of them.